Summary: Pitfalls for ISP-friendly P2P design
Michael Piatek
Harsha V. Madhyastha
John P. John
Arvind Krishnamurthy
Thomas Anderson
ABSTRACT
Peer-to-peer file sharing applications have become enor-
mously popular over the past few years, coming to repre-
sent a large fraction of wide-area Internet traffic. A side
effect of this explosive growth has been an emerging tus-
sle between users, who want fast downloads, and ISPs,
whose flat-rate pricing business model is threatened by the
extreme volume of P2P traffic. Because ISP costs scale
with usage while their prices do not, many ISPs have at-
tempted to throttle or shut down P2P systems. Recently,
several researchers have proposed that this tussle is unnec-
essary, that small changes in client and/or protocol behav-
ior can lead to a "win-win" solution of better performance
for end-users with less wide-area traffic for ISPs. Using